Blue Mass Group

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Serious People for Warren

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(Cross posted. Awesome event, glad I went!)

I just returned from a roundtable event with Elizabeth Warren here in Lowell at Mambo Grill, focused on women-owned small businesses, where I got to both be at the table, and also tweet my little heart out. (Dick Howe Jr, sitting nearby, was likely feeling a bit smug over that.) 😉 If you happened to catch my Twitter stream this afternoon, you would have been treated to quotes and photos from the event.

The local visit is part of the rolling out of the latest Warren endorsement – not only was Elizabeth joined by first-Congressperson-to-endorse Rep. Niki Tsongas, but also by Sheila Bair, former chair of the FDIC, a Republican who has never endorsed or campaigned for a Democrat but has decided to wade into this race. A G.W. Bush appointee, Bair worked with Warren on issues of stopping foreclosures and helping consumers during the financial meltdown, then also when Warren had oversight of the TARP program and the formation of the CFPB.

In the toss-around that is the rather tired old “bipartisan endorsement” game in the Commonwealth these days, why should you care about Sheila Bair’s? Because unlike other endorsements, this one has gravitas. It might not be a recognizable name to you, but in terms of really knowing Warren and her work, in places where it matters to average people, you can’t beat this former Chair of the FDIC.

It was great to hear Bair in person, and her reasons for endorsing Warren that go beyond party lines. For her, it’s about Warren’s real, tangible work on behalf of consumers, the middle class, homeowners, and squaring the financial system so that it’s fair for all. She said, specifically, that Warren is not anti-bank or anti-business, but rather is for an equal playing field for citizens and businesses alike.

Oh hell, I was on fire on my smartphone, I’m just going to include my own tweets here:

 

[Apologies, previous Tweet has a smartphone-induced typo in Bair’s name.]

 

When a reporter asked the obligatory question about bipartisaniness, Bair responded with concrete examples of why Elizabeth Warren was the one who would do the real work:

 

Two things of gleeful personal note: the silly press people had to ask Warren about the asbestos lawsuit thing, again, which I imagine has to be tiresome beyond belief, but in her response, Warren cited the asbestos union, the many victims, and the victims’ lawyers who’ve expressed dismay over Brown’s lies about the case. Glad to have helped with that.

Second, I got to ask a roundtable question, and I was debating talking about DBE issues (Disadvantaged Business Enterprise, a designation for federal DOT work as a women- or minority-owned business, for which my business was certified for several years) but…I decided to air out a long-standing frustration I have with a simple and obvious way that Dems can combat the “deregulate and untax businesses and they’ll grow!” idiocy from Republicans. I mentioned my own personal experience – that it’s the DEMAND from customers, not taxes, which are the arbiters of whether or not I expand as a business. If I have more work than I can handle, I hire. If it dries up, I shrink. Taxes and regulation have very little to do with it. If I can make money by expanding, of course I will!

This has been annoying the hell out of me – it’s such a simple, easily understood concept Dems could use to whack their Ayn Randian Republican opponents over the head with in debates and on the stump. Warren was all over it – citing the jobs bills that Brown voted against and helped to kill, which would have increased spending money in the hands of the employed, indirectly helping even my B-to-B business, nevermind the construction and infrastructure jobs bill which, as a WBE/DBE at the time, might have helped me land some really big contracts. Which would have forced me to hire, in all likelihood.

[Note to LiL/BMG readers: if this sounds familiar, it’s because I’ve said it before, and certainly the Mr. has said it before, to whom I give original credit.]

Anyway, I was grateful to finally get that little gem out in a meaningful way. I hope it is useful to her and she uses it! Now I just need to find a roundtable with Obama that I can crash…

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  1. At the Worcester event earlier in the day. Sounds like there was more interaction in Lowell – only the press got to ask questions here. I was much impressed by Bair, especially when she said “we need regulators with a backbone.” I had to wonder why she remains a Republican. I will definitely look up your twitter stream – you are so much better at that than I am!

  2. As long as you make an impassioned defense of regulations, generally, because people don’t have to go very far to find preposterously bad regulation, defended by Democrats, that conform precisely to the Republican stereotype.

    Wouldn’t it be great if, say, you were a city resident, and could have an app on your phone in which you note your place and destination, and someone else with the app could see that and give you a lift? It would be win-win-win. You get to go where you need to, without worrying whether the T will have a delay because it is sunny, or having to drive your own car with a single passenger in it. Other guy gets a little money for gas. We all get one less car on the road. All good? Your government thinks otherwise.

    And wouldn’t it be great, if you had skill braiding hair, if you could let people pay you for it? Sorry, not without your cosmetology license. $16,000, please.

    If Democrats want to credibly make the claim you make, then they need to be leading the charge to make the claim true.

    They’re not. Rather, they will defend all regulation as if they are the Clean Air Act– even those that obviously exist only because a particular interest group makes campaign contributions in return for protection against competition.

    • We wouldn’t want to regulate things like the pharmacological compounding industry. It might prevent them from making contributions to Senate candidates. What’s that about people dying from Fungal Meningitis? Never mind.

      • I surrender.

        That totally justifies the regulation of barbers.

        And cosmetologists.

        And massage therapists.

        And making sure that people can’t offer to carpool in return for some gas money.

        Clearly, had we been more supportive of the taxi industry and tougher on the unauthorized application of makeup, we would have avoided problems with the fungus contamination in Framingham.

        • can do DAMAGE to a person if they are not careful. Especially when dealing with things like cutting into cuticles and dealing with heavy massage around SPINES. Excuse me for wanting to have a process where we at least try to have these people be certified.

        • That totally justifies the regulation of barbers.

          And cosmetologists.

          And massage therapists.

          Barbers have a long history of branching into experimental dentistry and both barbers and cosmetologists have a long history of branching into experimental chemistry. Black people used to straighten their hair, an exercise in cosmetology, with gasoline with predictable results. Many cosmetologists might wish to provide Botox, which is a derivative of Botulinum toxin, one of the most potent neurotoxins on the entire planet.

          Why on earth would you NOT regulate barbers and cosmetologists?

          And massage parlors, besides being petri dishes of heat, humidity and human detritus in a sub-hygienic melange, are also quite often, for some reason, a few shades of grey away from a brothel; which things have long been attempted to be regulated out of existence.

        • I was talking with a senior citizen who was limping, turned out one of those nail ladies in her town had cut into one of her toenails so improperly that it was severely bleeding and was still bothering her a day later. Were they regulated? Don’t know. Should they be?

          If you are using scissors or razors on the public, yes you ought to be regulated. If you are doing manicures or pedicures, you also need to be regulated to ensure proper sanitation. Without going into details, let’s just say there are indeed horror stories involving fungus and nail salons without proper sanitation. This isn’t as serious as killing people, but it’s not something I’d wish anyone I know to experience.

          If someone is *only* braiding hair? No scissors involved? I could be convinced that doesn’t need regulation.

          Should a cosmetology license cost $16,000? That is arguable. Maybe it should cost $1,600 or $250 — I don’t know what the expenses are.

          • the nail thing is HUGELY underestimated. But people get infections all the time from bad conditions at nail salons. Even decent conditions can result in bad infections – but a badly trained cosmetologist can cut cuticles too close and result in injury. Nevermind the real horror stories…

            I want an inspector going into my nail salon and hair place and making sure sanitation and proper use of equipment is practiced.

          • What a crock.

            It is a marvel that the extensive regulations on who can give Advanced Seminars in Hairdressing didn’t save that poor woman from a bad pedicure.

            Doubtless the TLC saves us from “unsafe” vehicles– unlike, say, the taxi driven by a guy focused on his cell phone, and from which you can see the road through the floor. Those are perfectly safe.

            Thank goodness we have the government to save us from such horrors. One can only wonder how it came to pass that this happened at all. Perhaps we need to expand the training provided by increase the tuition charged by our registered professional programs frequent campaign contributors.

            Another instance of liberalism devolving into to corruption and rent-seeking by special interests.

            • And tution for the education in hairdressing you need before you get your license– provided by a for-profit campaign contributor near you– is around $12,000.

              These companies make a killing, for no other reason than the law entitles them to make a killing. Once you fork over your $12 grand and become an official hairdresser, you support the regulation simply because it is a barrier to entry for competition, allowing you to charge more for a haircut than you might otherwise be able to charge.

              Thus: rent seeking, economy stifling bad regulation, supported here by Democrats as if it is the Clean Water Act.

              And then, when you propose something that might actually BE like the Clean Water Act, you wonder why people don’t believe you.

              • attend a private school. Every vocational school in the commonwealth offers a qualified course at no cost to the student and many community colleges offer the cost at a significantly reduced rate or even for free with scholarships.

                Paying for education isn’t the licensing fee. It’s paying for the education. That’s like saying that a teacher’s license costs $200,000 because the teacher attended Middlebury College.

                The point is that some regulations are not effective in doing what they were intended and some are. If regulations are bad they should be either rescinded or revised, but most regulations are important safety measures.

    • administration has said anything like that. Oh wait.

      We can all come together to discuss regulations that may not make sense. But, in the case of Sheila Bair, we’re talking about Wall Street. And I think it’s pretty clear that things like credit-default swaps were under-regulated, not over-regulated. My aunt used to work in the mortgage department of a bank in the 50s and 60s and was shocked to learn from an old friend, still there, in 2006 how many of the basic rules had been eliminated. That didn’t turn out well.

      I’m not trying to dispute your substantive point by jumping all over the specific example you gave. But hell no, I don’t want an app that tells anyone where I am while I’m walking around the city. That stuff gives me the creeps.

      • Glad that has been such a centerpiece of the Democratic campaign position since last May.

        The list of purely rent-seeking, economically burdensome, bad regulation is long. Democrats like them because they bring lots of campaign contributions from the rent-seeking industry, and don’t irritate anyone else sufficiently badly to lead to organized opposition. It does, however, lead to the pervading sense that government red tape is a feature, not a bug, for Democrats, and thus leave them open to accusations of being anti-business.

        Discussing “regulations” in the abstract is silly, because every useful, successful example is set off by something crappy, like our recent Dodd-Frank legislation. (Problem identified, ignored. Solutions left to an unelected bureaucrat to publish in a few tens of thousands of pages of the Federal Regfister. Fail, as the kids say.

        You want a new regulation? You convince me that there is a problem, that it can only be solved by government, and that the regulation you want will be effective at solving the problem, and isn’t just another attempt to manufacture a constituency of taxi medallion owners to hit up every two years. You can build credibility by admitting when a regulation fails to solve the original problem, or creates as many problems as it solves, and making changes to rectify the situation.

        • is why you are a man without a party.

          the silliness on both sides just means that you support whoever annoys you less at any given moment.

          me too.

          • In theory, different tools for different problems. Sometimes the patient needs anti-biotics, sometimes the patient needs to get off the patient’s posterior and get some exercise already. And we choose the tool to fix– or not make worse– the most pressing problem of the moment. I guess that boils down to whomever is less irritating at the moment.

            Alas, for at least the last 10 years, it hasn’t been close: one party annoys me, and the other appalls me. It would be nice if that would change, eventually.

        • I couldn’t agree more. And President Obama agrees as well; and he’s said so way before this year.

          The problem I have with the current Republican party is that they think all regulation is bad (and all taxes are bad). That really bugs me.

          There is such a thing as too much regulation and there is such a thing as too little regulation. One can complain that some Democrats are too quick to see regulation as a solution to every problem, but all Democrats are not dogmatically for over-regulation, period. Not at all the way the 2012 Republican party is convinced that “regulation” is bad and reducing regulation is good.

          It really is philosophically possible not to want needless regulation that stifles commerce and also not want arsenic in your water.

          Read President Obama’s piece in the Wall Street Journal from January 2011. Sorry, not sure if subscription is needed, so here’s the key point in his words:

          Sometimes, [government] rules have gotten out of balance, placing unreasonable burdens on business—burdens that have stifled innovation and have had a chilling effect on growth and jobs. At other times, we have failed to meet our basic responsibility to protect the public interest, leading to disastrous consequences.

          Show me where either Scott Brown or Mitt Romney has had a similarly reasonable position.

    • to an app where you can report things like potholes and other things needing fixing. Pretty cool.

      The app to find rides things sounds like a liability nightmare, if you ask me.

      Those things are in place for a reason, and just because the media does a poor job of reaching into the story to find out what’s really happening, and Republicans take advantage of a story that SEEMS ridiculous, yeah, sure, it’ll be a hard sell.

      Remember, the lady who sued McD’s for burns due to their hot coffee had THIRD DEGREE BURNS, and it turned out the temp McDs left their coffee sitting at was extremely and unnecessarily high, but the Republicans used that story to death to try and enact tort reform. Truth be damned.

    • “…people don’t have to go very far to find preposterously bad regulation, defended by Democrats..”

      While its certainly true that there are bad regulations, and it is also certainly true that at least some bad regulations are championed by one or more Democrats, your comment leaves the impression that it is ‘generally findable’ that bad regulations, in general, are Democratic Party creations.

      You go on to point out some very notably bad specific regulations, but it would be a mistake to link those regulations to some kind of ‘Democratic Party’ origin and championing without specific backup. Note also that backup that points out that Democrat X championed or proposed bad regulation Y isn’t enough to establish that the axis of it’s origin leans left. You further have to show that it wasn’t also championed and/or cosponsored by GOPers. Thus we see that to sufficiently back up such a broad claim (even if it isn’t made outright but implied) involves a significant amount of legwork – the kind of legwork that would likely result in a study paper.

      Not having done that legwork myself, but having lived through the era that turned (so some people surmized) ‘liberal’ into a bad word by use of constant bad-associations, I feel sufficiently skeptical to without belief of the claim until sufficient backup is presented or presents itself.

      All that said, I think what you’re more likely to find is that the bad regulations you’re citing generally involve ‘rent-seeking’ and there are plenty on the left who go after such things (at least in the punditocracy*). Such rent-seeking regulations are more about money and privilege rather than good governance. As such, the forces seeking to support them generally flow like water to the whatever politician will reciprocate, not caring which party they’re talking about**.

      Now you’ll find, in the area of general national economic policy, talk about ‘regulations’ in general are usually invoked to bring up the general set of rent-seeking regulations that advantage actors in the economy in ways that are (at least perceived to be) unfair. If one were to address the types of regulations you’ve cited ‘in general’ you certainly wouldn’t see that as a bad thing. Also you wouldn’t necessarily see the ‘talk’ as being overly vague. I’d just point out that the ‘general’ talk that you protest, however, is the same kind of animal – just on a bigger scale. Not a bigger scale because the regulations are less specific, but a bigger scale because the effects, scope, and actors are so large. The principal in bringing them up ‘in general’ is the same, however.

      * Yglesias and Klein in particular regularly feature such issues. Yglesias also talks quite a bit about market-distorting regulations, taxes, and tax breaks around the issue of housing that are generally not noticed to have bad effects by the majority of people.

      ** A notable exception was the effort of the K Street Project, where one party organized to systematically strong-armed business into supporters of only one party as a matter of policy, rather successfully.

  3. Every time I see Blade Runner or Episodes 1 through 3 of Star Wars, the first thing that jumps to my mind is that is what Boston will look like if there was no zoning code or if the Zoning Board of Appeals continues to grants every stupid appeal that comes before it.

    To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:

    Even regulations.

    • Where the height restriction is killing the market for housing by arbitrarily limiting density.

  4. I’m sick of it too. I happen to work in an industry that is very sensitive to the boom and bust economic cycles. I can assure that the owners of my company are not shuffling around the office, wringing their hands, and mumbling about how if they only had a tax cut everything would be alright. Nonsense. Of cource it is lack of effective demand. But I challenge anyone to prove different. Any of you small business owners out there think a tax cut will prod you to hire people?

    • Like big corporations, if I got a mythical tax cut that increased the profits I was sitting on (yeah, right!) I’d sit on them more until demand went up. Why would I hire, say, a web developer, if I have no work for him to do?? Just because I have some extra cash on hand??

      It’s so duh.

    • When the liars Republicans say “small businesses”, they mean S-corps, LLCs, and LLPs — corporate entities that pass through income to owners/shareholders so that the income is taxed at (much lower) personal, as opposed to corporate, rates. Payroll expenses are already deductible from that income. Any owner/shareholder who wants to reduce his or her taxes can already do so by hiring more people.

      The suggestion that raising taxes on this segment will cause them to lay people off, or that lowering taxes will cause them to hire more people, is a flagrant lie.

      It’s just the same old GOP song-and-dance — ANY lame rationalization for slashing taxes is fine by them, regardless of the consequences.

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